The Nose Knows: Can Dogs Be Trained to Sniff Out Cancer?

DINA ZAPHIRIS, founder and CEO of the In Situ Foundation — which trains dogs to sniff out cancer — poses with (from left) Stewie, Linus and Leo. Among them, the dogs have the ability to detect breast, lung, ovarian and orolaryngeal cancers. – COURTESY DINA ZAPHIRIS

We’ve published articles about dogs being trained to “sniff out cancer” before, but this story, interesting in itself, also links back to a site called “Cure Today,” which has a wealth of information for human cancer patients, including cancer types-overviews, advocacy, event coverage, the latest updates on research, a forum for discussion, and a place to share stories. We hope you’ll find not only this article interesting, but also “Cure Today” helpful as well.

Scientists are working to harness dogs’ ability to sniff out cancer.
Heather Millar
PUBLISHED: APRIL 18, 2017

When it comes to detecting cancer, our dogs appear to have much keener senses than we do.

Take the special-needs teacher in Kent, England, who in 2015 noticed that her German shepherd, Inca, had become unusually interested in smelling her breath. She went to the doctor for a check-up and found out she had lung cancer. Because of the dog, she believes, it was diagnosed early, at stage 1.

The same year, a 40-year-old Rochester, Minnesota, woman was studying for a university test when her golden retriever-St. Bernard mix started nosing at her left side and acting crazy. When she went to brush away the dog slobber, she felt a lump. She was later diagnosed with breast cancer.

Actress Shannen Doherty — famous for her roles in the TV show “Beverly Hills 90210” and the movie “Heathers” — reported a similar experience with her German shepherd Bowie; now, she’s undergoing treatment for breast cancer.

Google “My dog detected my cancer” and you’ll find dozens of similar anecdotes, from all over the world. In fact, anecdotes about such occurrences go back decades. There’s no proof that any of these pet dogs, untrained in cancer detection, truly found the disease. Still, what was once just fun material for tabloids or an offbeat research topic is now beginning to gain a toehold in the mainstream, with research teams and nonprofit organizations gnawing at the problem worldwide.

These are very early days for peer-reviewed research, but studies have established that some dogs, after intensive training, can indeed detect many types of cancer — breast, ovarian, lung, prostate, thyroid, colorectal, melanoma — from a variety of biological samples, including breath, urine, plasma and blood.

The daunting challenge now is to replicate those studies. Then, scientists must figure out how to translate dogs’ diagnostic skill into clinically useful, standardized protocols that can be scaled up from study samples of a few dozens or hundreds to the millions who are screened for cancer each year.

Why would scientists take a chance on an animal that can, like any living being, be unpredictable?

It’s because a dog’s sense of smell is so profound that it’s like a superpower: Dogs have approximately 300 million odor receptors, compared with 6 million, at best, in humans. They also have a second smelling apparatus, the “vomeronasal organ,” a patch of sensory cells near the back of their nasal cavity that’s dedicated to detecting pheromones, moisture-borne odor particles unique to each species that carry signals such as sexual readiness. A dog’s anatomy allows it to sniff pretty much continuously, separating air into one stream for respiration and into another stream for smelling.

Proportionally, the section of a dog’s brain devoted to analyzing smells is 40 times larger than that section in humans. Estimates vary, but scientists think that a dog’s sense of smell may be 10,000 to 100,000 times better than ours.

It’s difficult to wrap your mind around a sense that powerful. We humans live in a vision-dominated reality. To translate the difference in smelling power into visual terms, imagine that we humans can only perceive light and dark in two dimensions through a pinhole while dogs see thousands of shapes and shades in 3-D Technicolor. Scientists also like to use this vision analogy: It’s as if we can see a third of a mile away, while dogs can see 3,000 miles away.

Add to this that current methods of cancer detection, alas, are often hit-or-miss. In many cases, symptoms don’t appear until the disease is in late stages. And many types of cancer, such as ovarian or prostate, can’t be detected reliably at early stages

WHAT WE DO
In Situ Foundation has spent thousands of hours, spanning many years, developing the scientific protocols that are needed to train cancer detection dogs and their handlers.

We use samples collected by doctors, which are sent to us and stored in an -80 degree medical freezer.

It takes over 300 samples to train one dog. All of our dogs are trained on cancer samples, healthy control samples, and disease control samples. It takes anywhere between 6 to 8 months to train and certify a cancer detection dog. Our dogs must also be friendly and social, since they will work with people. Dogs do not sniff an actual person — they sniff samples such as breath, plasma, urine and sputum (saliva).

Dogs are presented with a known cancer sample for training, and they are rewarded for being able to determine the cancer sample from the healthy samples. Over time, the odor of “cancer” is generalized, which is of extreme importance when training a medical scent detection dog. A very large number of samples are used, and we never re-use a sample for training or testing our dogs accuracy levels.

All accuracy levels were attained by doing “double-blinded” trials, where brand new samples are numbered, and the dog is able to find all of the new, different cancer samples among brand new healthy controls and disease controls. This way, we can be sure the dog has “generalized” the “cancer odor”, and is not merely memorizing samples.